NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2015 Sep 28, 18:10 -0700
Yes, Norm.
The Moon's angular diameter is, of course, critical to lunars. And even in the late 18th century, the astronomers and mathematicians who wrote about the methods for clearing lunars marveled about the remarkable fact that the Moon looks so huge, subjectively, at the horizon when in reality, by every objective measure, it is slightly smaller. The Moon is largest, all other things being equal, when it is high overhead. Step one in clearing a lunar is to add the semi-diameters of the Sun and Moon (or in the case of stars and planets, either add or subtract the Moon's semi-diameter depending on whether we measure to the near or far limb. The semi-diameter was not simply an hourly tabulated value. It was a value "augmented" by the increase in size with altitude. Next, removing the effect of the Moon's parallax in altitude along the lunar arc was, by far, the most important correction in clearing a lunar. That was actually the main step. It depended on ephemeris tables giving the Moon's HP every few hours of every day.
Incidentally, there is a simple proportional relationship between the listed geocentric semi-diameter of the Moon and its parallax at the horizon (hence known as its "horizontal" parallax). The SD is 27.24% of the HP:
SD = 0.2724 · HP.
Frank Reed